Why Designing Affordances Is Apple’s Secret Design Superpower
Apple products aren’t usually the first to market in new categories, but what lifts their products into design icons is usually one revolutionary affordance that makes it sublimely user-friendly.
Apple’s new AirPods Pro are a worthy upgrade to its excellent line of wireless earphones, but experientially, what stands out about them isn’t the tech; it’s, quite literally, this little touch. When you look at the AirPods Pro, there’s no obvious way to interact with them besides putting them in your ears. There are no buttons or knobs or switches. However, on the stem of the AirPods Pro, there is one part that is slightly thinner than the rest, suggesting that it has been squeezed between the thumb and forefinger.
In design parlance, this is what is called an affordance. As defined by the design thinker Don Norman, an affordance is a clue as to how an object otherwise unfamiliar to us is meant to be interacted with. The AirPods Pro have two affordances. One is the general shape, which suggests being put in the ears, but the other is this little squeezed bit in the stem. Because when you want to turn on the noise isolation tech in the AirPods Pro to hear what’s happening around you, you reach up, pinch the earbud stem, and immediately all of the ambient noise around you is closed off.
It’s like there’s a noise-isolating diaphragm over your ears, and to open and close it, you pinch it open and shut. And words can’t really easily convey how satisfying it is to do. It’s an interaction that represents Apple at its best: a pairing of affordance and interaction that makes new UI concepts explicable and familiar through the power of metaphor.
Affordances are something Apple has always been extremely good at. The original computer desktop, adapted from a design by the legendary Xerox PARC labs for the first Mac, is a collection of skeuomorphic affordances: folders that you can drag files into, a recycling bin on the desktop for throwing away trash. The original mouse, an ergonomic puck with buttons you can click, was also adapted by Apple from work done by Xerox PARC. These innovations seem obvious now, but that’s the genius of a good affordance, which is the closest thing design has to poetry. Artfully done, an affordance has both elegance and familiarity to it. It feels timeless and inevitable, when the reality is it was anything but.
Looking over Apple’s product history, great affordances are Apple’s secret design weapon. On a conceptual level, Apple products aren’t usually the first to market in new categories, but what lifts their products into design icons usually comes down to at least one revolutionary affordance that makes it sublimely user friendly.
Take the iPod, for example. It wasn’t the first portable media player (PMP). Brands like Creative, Archos, and even Audible(!) beat Apple to market with digital devices that could play compressed audio. What set the iPod apart, though, was its iconic click wheel user interface, which borrowed the UI metaphor of a DJ turntable to allow users to “spin” back and forth between tracks. The click wheel is such an iconic affordance that, to this day, to look at a PMP with a button-based navigation system seems somehow awkward, like a car with legs instead of wheels.
Similarly, think of the iPhone. Before the iPhone, smartphones were designed like cellphones: small screens and a face chock-full of T9 buttons. The iPhone swept that vestigial cruft aside as irrelevant to a device that was a “phone” in FCC classification only: It was really a multimedia window to a new digital world, and the screen was the interface. But just so you didn’t ever get lost in a wholly novel medium, Jony Ive came up with an affordance to ground you: the home button, a single familiar interface element that will bring you back to square one, no matter where you are in Apple’s walled garden.
And the Apple Watch, too, is grounded by a genius affordance: the digital crown, which takes the winding apparatus of an analog wrist watch and adapts it for the wearable age as a combination button/scroll wheel that functions as both the iPod’s click wheel and the iPhone’s home button. Like many of the best affordances, the digital crown borrows the design language of a cultural touch point and adapts it for a new, radically different purpose, transforming an interface that was peripheral into something that feels deeply intuitive.
None of this praise is to say that Apple’s competitors aren’t good at affordances, too. The Windows start menu, Google search bar, and Amazon one-click shopping button are all great examples of visual affordance design. But Apple seems so defined as a company by its ability to get affordances right, both in software and hardware, that its flawed affordances are all the more noticeable. For example, Apple abandoned Force Touch, a genuinely useful contextual menu system for earlier iPhones, in favor of an inferior system in part because most users didn’t understand it was triggered by the pressure with which they pressed the screen.
I call affordance design Apple’s superpower, because affordances are something that any company hoping to revolutionize the world through consumer technology has to be really good at designing. They are the steering wheels, the bicycle handles, the pull chains, and doorbells of our increasingly high-tech world, and Apple, as a company, has created or popularized more of them in recent years than practically any other company. So when I squeeze my AirPods Pro to hear my wife ask me a question over my podcast, I’m not just interacting with a gadget; I’m taking part in a golden age of affordance design.
Magenta is a publication of Huge.
